The big players have been at it again this month – Google have struck an important deal with Dell, also Yahoo and eBay have joined forces.

Google’s deal with Dell seems to be push toward challenging Microsoft’s dominance. Roughly 90% of the world’s computers have Microsoft’s products on them, which the computers automatically default to. Google’s new deal with Dell means that a range of Google’s programs will come as standard on Dell’s computers, more importantly, Google’s search engine will be set as the default on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. For Google, this means that potentially millions of us will use their products whereas we may otherwise have used Microsoft’s products.

Yahoo and eBay have also joined forces this month. Yahoo will now be the exclusive provider of the branded advertising on eBay’s website, and in return, Yahoo can let customers pay for its services using eBay’s ‘Paypal’ payment system. The real meaning of this deal is that 80% of the US Internet audience will be now reached by Yahoo and eBay. The business possibilities for both companies are huge, and the effects are bound to be felt here very soon.

PageRank is system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It is intended to be an indicator of a page's value on the web. What Google decides are high quality pages, receive a higher PageRank. This is shown as a mark out of 10. If you download Google's toolbar (which is free), the PageRank of each site that you visit is diplayed as a green band, then by passing your mouse over it, the ranking number is displayed.

PageRank is certainly not the only important factor where Google is concerned, because there are over 100 other factors involved in ranking your website / web pages.

However, the 2 main ways in which PageRank can affect your web pages' positions in Google are:
1) The number of incoming links to your page
2) The number of outgoing links from the page that points at yours. The less links it has, the better the PageRank for your page.

Whatever the situation, there are two important rules of thumb that you can apply to your web pages which will make it

difficult for them not to get high rankings:
1) Make sure you have plenty of good web page content which can easily be crawled by search engines.
2) Make sure you have plenty of inbound links that come from relevant and reputable websites.

Getting a high ranking for your website from search engines is not achieved by just adding 'Meta Tags' to the head of your web pages. Meta Tags are basically code inserted into a part of your web page which is not visible to visitors. They can influence how your web pages are described by some search engines, and can prevent pages from being indexed at all.

The most common types of meta tags you may have in your web pages include TITLE, META DESCRIPTION & META KEYWORDS.

Whatever text is in the title tag will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page - the reverse bar in the Explorer Browser is the blue horizontal bar at the top. The contents of this tag also display in browser 'favourites' or 'bookmarks' when details of your site have been saved by somebody. The text you use in this TITLE tag is in fact, a critical factor in deciding how a search engine will rank your web page. Its contents will also display in the listings of 'crawler' search engines.

You can influence the description of your web pages by some crawler search engines, if you use the META DESCRIPTION tag.

Google however will actually ignore this tag, and will generate its own description for a page.

Most crawler search engines now ignore the META KEYWORDS tag. It's main use at the moment is allowing you to provide extra text to your pages for search engines to index. The text in the META KEYWORDS tag should also be mentioned in the text of the page below to make it useful for some crawler search engines. Using the same keywords too often in the META KEYWORD tag can damage your web pages chances of ranking well in the search engines.